Back Story Page 0,66
was, I’ve also read, performing sketches at a Christmas party. That means he waited weeks, months before trying to break into the performing scene at college. Not me; I went to fifteen auditions in my first weekend.
Yes: following some successful A-level results and an interview, I discovered halfway through my gap year that I’d got into Cambridge. I’d decided to apply there instead of Oxford because, having left school, it struck me as a good idea to spread my wings a little and get away from the place where I grew up – albeit only to somewhere unbelievably similar.
Getting in felt like more of a relief than a triumph. By then, I’d managed to persuade myself that, after all the years of obsessing about exams, not to get to Oxbridge would be a disastrous failure. Ridiculous though this view is, I felt it sufficiently strongly that, psychologically, I’d probably made it true and, had I not got to Cambridge, I would have slunk to whatever other perfectly good university had admitted me with an irreversible sense of defeat. Or perhaps I would have been stung by the rejection into intense hard work and made billions out of a dotcom. Nevertheless, my overwhelming emotion was of having averted a disaster – which, if anything, feels better than a triumph.
When I arrived at Peterhouse, Cambridge, in October 1993 it was time for Phase 2 of my plan: reject academe and get stuck into drama immediately. (If my admissions tutor is reading this, I’m sorry. It’s Oxford I was angry with. But I couldn’t take it out on them, because they hadn’t let me in.)
The two largest drama societies in Cambridge, the Amateur Dramatic Club and Footlights, both held Freshers’ week ‘squashes’ – the Cambridge name for drinks dos aimed at attracting new members. (Cambridge University has lots of its own words for things that there are perfectly good words for in wider circulation. This is one of the ways in which Cambridge University is like sailors.) The Footlights squash was held in its clubroom – a dark, damp, spider-infested room in the Union Society cellars, which had been expensively decorated to the height of fashion in 1978.
As soon as I arrived, I was offered a drink: ‘There’s red or white wine – I’m afraid the lager’s just run out.’ The significance of that remark was lost on me at the time – more of that later. I joined Footlights; it seemed you didn’t have to audition to be a member, just pay a fiver. However, you did have to audition to be in any of the shows or ‘smokers’ (late-night cabaret evenings). The next show was the Christmas pantomime – I made a note of when and where to audition and then attempted, in a shy 18-year-old way, to ‘work the room’. This involved walking round the room without talking to anyone in it. Finally I managed to introduce myself to Dan Mazer, later producer of Ali G Indahouse, at that point Footlights vice-president and in his third year at Peterhouse, the same college as me. We had an awkward chat and then I left.
At the Amateur Dramatic Club squash, people were more helpful and welcoming, in a way that immediately made me think less of the institution. I’m not proud of that but there’s no doubt Footlights’ shabby standoffishness, coupled with its fame, projected greater cachet than the ADC’s inclusive efficiency. The ADC welcomed those keen on any and every element of theatre production: not just acting and writing but all the boring ones as well. In fact, those seemed to be the priority, possibly because the ADC had its own theatre and so was very focused on everything you could do with and in it: lighting, set-building, publicity, front of house, costume, make-up, etc. I was slightly put off by all that. But what I was much more put off by was the fact that, scandalisingly, one of the committee members, a student only two years older than me, had a baby – her own baby – which she was sort of wielding like it was the most natural thing in the world. I reckoned that meant she’d definitely had sex.
Keeping on the opposite side of the room from the girl with the baby, I finally managed to ask someone wearing an authoritative T-shirt about acting and how to get involved.
‘The standard,’ I was told, ‘is incredibly high.’ (This was a lie.) ‘You probably won’t get a part in anything